In my history class on the Vietnam War I learned that when Vietnam declared itself a free country its declaration of independence was modeled after the US' and had a very western, enlightenment ideology. It wasn't trying to be communist initially. It literally says that France/Japan "hampered the prospering of [Vietnam's] national bourgeoisie" but communism doesn't want a prospering bourgeoise, they blame it for exploiting the proletariate. So Vietnam wanted to be like America, not China or the USSR. Also, if the US was so against communisms spread, wouldn't helping Vietnam achieve independence and creating a democracy stop them from becoming communist?
But instead, the US chose to help the French continue to repress a colony for its resources without giving it any power JUST like Britain did to the US. My only guess is the US saw itself so powerful and strong that it didn't care about Vietnam and chose to side with its ally instead of its principles.
What do you think?
This is a good question.
You can overstate the extent to which Ho Chi Minh was a die-hard Marxist toeing the Moscow line, but to be sure, he had spent the better part of decades living abroad in Moscow, Shanghai, and elsewhere while living around fellow revolutionaries. He helped organize a united communist party in the late 1920s and was a reliable member of the Comintern. Minh believed in some kind of centrally planned socialist economy, and a lot of that rhetoric about western enlightenment was his attempt at diplomacy. Here's the rub of it, though (and some U.S. planners said the same thing): the United States didn't have to be the enemy of every communist state. They weren't, for that matter. The United States had a basically positive relationship with Yugoslavia, which admittedly had a much worse relationship with the USSR than many others, but which nevertheless was a Marxist state. Nevertheless, there were policy planners who did think that there could be nuance in U.S. relations with the outside world.
And as you note, there were plenty of reasons culturally why U.S. hostility toward a communist Vietnam was not inevitable. The United States was in theory a state born out of anticolonial struggle. Minh had forged some connections with Americans during WWII. Admittedly, Archimedes Patti and the others were not particularly high-ranking, but they were there. Perhaps most telling is that when Roosevelt was still alive, he had talked about taking Indochina away from France and giving it to the future UN as a trusteeship. Part of that was Roosevelt's antipathy for colonialism (he said some strikingly critical things about the British too), and part of it was his antipathy toward the French (he comes across as strikingly resentful of the French for having been defeated so quickly in 1940).
Regardless, things changed. Why? Part of it is Roosevelt's death. Whether Roosevelt would have followed through on his earlier ideas about Vietnam is debatable, especially as the Cold War heated up. Truman, however, didn't have particularly strong feelings about the colonized world. His priorities were simply trying to follow Roosevelt's foreign policy (no easy task: Roosevelt was notoriously secretive, and Truman and Roosevelt had only met a handful of times), and then matching the Soviet Union. In trying to do the former, he came to rely on people in the State Department who were really Eurocentric in their worldview. People like Dean Acheson, Truman's third secretary of state were pretty doubtful of the ability of nonwhite peoples to govern themselves; Acheson would be labeled a racist today in all likelihood. But even George Kennan, the architect of containment (somebody who had some uncomfortably racist ideas as well) and George Marshall saw the balance of power in the world in Europe. Kennan's papers from his time as head of the Policy Planning Staff (1948-1949) make clear that there were just a few centers of power in the world: the U.S., Japan, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. Everything else was ultimately peripheral. It's what informs the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Western Europe. It also means that European partners are generally held as a top priority, and France, being a large state, is regarded as essential to both European economic reconstruction and a security arrangement that will keep the Soviets at bay.
By itself, that wasn't necessarily enough to put the United States on the side of colonial powers. After all, the United States comes down on the side of the Indonesians in their independence struggle against the Dutch. However, the Cold War is the other determining factor in this equation. As some kind of contest with the Soviet Union becomes inevitable, communist parties become increasingly difficult to tolerate. The Indonesians did a good job of purging communists from their ranks; Ho Chi Minh did not. The Yugoslavians could be tolerated because A: the Soviets hadn't helped them come to power, and that meant Josip Tito had an independent power base, and B: their open break with Moscow was actually useful to the Americans because it made Moscow look weak. The same could not be said of Ho Chi Minh, who had ties to Moscow, and who essentially forced a choice between France and Vietnam. In that situation, the United States chose France.
Sources
Embers of War by Fredrik Logevall
Assuming the Burden by Mark Atwood Lawrence